Vanilla 2.1 stable released

It is with great pleasure and pride that I announce the immediately availability of the Vanilla 2.1 stable release. Vanilla 2.1 represents a huge leap forward for our open source product.

If you are on our cloud platform, please note you already have all the enhancements in 2.1 (and have for quite a while) so you don't need to do anything - this announcement does not apply to you.

I want to thank our community members here for their unwavering support over the last several years. The issues filed, pull requests sent, and questions answered are invaluable and we truly appreciate it. The last year has definitely seen an increase in community participation in the product and that's very exciting.

Delete the files /themes/mobile/views/discussions/helper_functions.php AND /applications/dashboard/views/default.master.php (notdefault.master.tpl which should also be in that folder)

Delete the value $Configuration['Vanilla']['Views']['Denormalize'] = TRUE; from /conf/config.php if it is present, unless you are knowingly running memcached and have configured it. If that value is not in your config, you have nothing to do and may continue.

Run/index.php?p=/utility/update to update the database. It may take a while. If it fails, run it again. It picks up where it left off if it doesn't complete due to a timeout.

Troubleshooting Tips

These are some generic tips for addressing problems during an upgrade.

Set $Configuration['Debug'] = TRUE; in your conf/config.php to reveal full error messages. Remember to remove it when you are done.

Clear your browser cache and cookies, then restart your browser.

Clear *.ini files from the cache folder.

Revert to the default theme. You can do this manually in conf/config.php by setting the $Configuration['Garden']['Theme'] value to default.

Disable plugins. If you cannot get to your Dashboard, you can manually delete lines containing EnabledPlugins in conf/config.php but do not remove HTMLawed's line.

Try running /utility/update again (see upgrade instructions).

Verify your permissions are correct for every role. Then go to /role/defaultroles and confirm your default roles are set correctly.

Start a new discussion on this site with your version number (likely 2.1 if you're reading this), the exact error message you got, and what you were doing when you got it.

What's changed?

Too much to list effectively. The 2.0 branch had 4,615 code commits. The 2.1 branch now sits at 8,639. That means we made nearly as many changes from 2.0.18 to 2.1 as we made cumulatively from the first 2.0 alpha build thru the 16 rapid 2.0-branch stable releases over three years. I cannot hope to distill down a list of 4000 changes into a comprehensive summary, especially given the amount of time elapsed. So the short answer to "Did X change at all?" is "yes". There's no such thing as a selective upgrade this time around.

Here's a broad overview of what we did:

Rebooted the default theme to be easier to customize with fewer colors & rules and lower specificity in CSS

Switched to Smarty by default and added more helper functions

Improved the HTML structure of the entire site and made it easier for plugin developers to hook into common events

Added new Homepage & Banner options in the Dashboard

Added pluggable Social Integrations into core

Made it easier to do translations in more languages by re-architecting our activity stream & notifications

Replaced tabbed navigation structure

Redesigned Profiles for easier naviation & theming & plugin hooking

Simplified permissions

Added the "MeModule" for simplified navigation (your avatar, name, and glyph links that appears in the sidebar by default)

2.1 is the revision that got away from us, and so this upgrade will be a little more painful than past ones. We've learned from the pain of getting this release out the door and have revised our strategies accordingly.

What do forum owners need to change?

Test all plugins you're using before upgrading.

Any core hacks in 2.0 should be ditched (and, ideally, not recreated).

Rebuild your theme against 2.1 if you made any significant customizations. If you customized views, definitely delete them and get the new ones.

Abandon these plugins if you haven't yet:

ProxyConnect has been replaced by jsConnect.

<Embed> has been replaced by the Embed Forum option now in core.

Those plugins will all be disappearing in the next version. We recommend deleting them from your server entirely.

What's next?

We're going to let 2.1 percolate for a few months and release the inevitable patches as it reaches more and more folks. That should keep everyone busy thru the summer. Patches will use the third decimal (2.1.1, then 2.1.2, etc). We've abandoned using a fourth decimal for releases.

Our next major open source release will be 2.3 (we've changed our versioning scheme; see the new README) and we expect to begin that beta cycle by the end of the year. We're already more than a thousand commits beyond 2.1.

We will continue to support 2.0 with security patches thru the end of 2014. After that we shall bid it an overdue farewell.

The 2.1.B3 download thread (that I can no longer find) talked about cleditor text editor being replace with a "new" text editor that would come with the release of 2.1. I am not seeing any new editors in the core. Is there a new plugin available for download (could not find any)?

Oh good , it would be nice if the text editor is also updated. But I don't see it on GitHub. (master). I like the new text editor, simple, clean, and very interesting emoticons. And the most I like to write features such as BBCode format. Because it is widely used by most of the existing forums. I hope this feature will be there for the next release.

@registerid said:
Oh good , it would be nice if the text editor is also updated. But I don't see it on GitHub. (master). I like the new text editor, simple, clean, and very interesting emoticons. And the most I like to write features such as BBCode format. Because it is widely used by most of the existing forums. I hope this feature will be there for the next release.

BBCode is already there! You can find that line in your /conf/config-defaults.php file: $Configuration['Garden']['InputFormatter'] = 'Html'; // Html, BBCode, Markdown, Text. So copy that line into /conf/config.php and exchange the "Html" with "BBCode".
Every discussion/comment you write after inserting that line, will be understanding BBCodes. (As far as I know, they will understand the Html formatting additionally, btw.)

IMPORTANT! Anyone who has upgraded from any 2.0 version to any 2.1 version should delete /applications\dashboard\views\default.master.php. There should now be a file there named default.master.tpl which you should use as the basis for new themes (Smarty templating).

Not the end of the world if you miss this, but it'll make life easier in the long run. I've added this to the instructions above. And ^5 to @jameswill for catching that.

@FabulousPanda said:
Awesome! Do you know when 2.1 is likely to hit softaculous?

We will be contacting vendors later in the week, but it's up to them when to upgrade. We're letting it sit for a little to make sure we don't need to issue a patch before we start harassing folks to upgrade.

@registerid I answered the question about the new editor a few comments before you and I see R_J got the rest. For the record, we actually really don't like BBCode at all, but there is an addon called NBBC that gives even better BBCode support. We're probably going to put that in core for 2.3, along with the new Advanced Editor. However, we're also going to make Markdown the new default of Vanilla in that install instead of Html.

@R_J After you run /utility/update in 2.1 the first time, it copies that InputFormatter config to config.php, so everyone should have it there from now on without needing to go to config-default. We're doing that to preserve folks' current selection so that we can change the default to Markdown in 2.3 without messing with upgrades.

@R_J & @Lincoln
I've tried to change it from HTML to BBCode in config.php. But it doesn't work for CLEditor plugin. Just working on ButtonBar alone. Even NBBC plugin also doesn't work. Btw, I am using version 2.2.11 from the Github repo. Thanks for your answer I can hardly wait for the new "advanced text editor", I really like the Emoji feature.